by Liz Byrski
You’ve seen those wildlife documentaries where a lion surveys a herd of gazelle from the sidelines and you know, you just know, it’s going to be that poor scraggly thing at the back that it chooses. I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t do for the scraggly one in the middle to be complacent, either.
I was the last, that night, to be coolly selected.
Like everyone else, I had turned in my seat to watch as the dancers left the stage and roamed the aisles, searching, selecting. I wasn’t on the end of a row; I felt safe.
And then I became aware of a frisson of movement to my right. I heard gasps. I glanced around. There was a dark, lithe figure inching along my row from the side. At that point, I began to mutter: Not me, not me, please not me.
Alas …
On stage my stern, cool partner morphed into a riotous headbanger, like the other dancers and the women from the audience they had led up on stage, and so in the spirit of okay-there’s-clearly-no-getting-out-of-this and what-the-hey-it-will-be-over-before-you-know-it, I flung myself around a bit. For a whole song. And then, thank the universe, the music stopped, people cheered, and it was done, right?
No.
A Broadway song began, but the professional dancers were into their routine now and nothing seemed to be required of the amateurs other than to stand there and watch (and marvel – those dancers were amazing). I also looked around surreptitiously for the nearest exit off the stage. But there was to be no quick exit for me.
The Broadway song segued into a cha-cha, and what little participation was demanded of me I managed (except for the bit when the poor man tried to lift me; I whispered, You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.).
Note, please, that by now I had been up there for three songs.
What relief when the track finished and the dancers led us to the front of the stage to bow. Even when another song began, I remained elated because it really did seem to be over. The amateurs were being led off the stage to the left, to the right.
Unfortunately, I was not going anywhere.
Despite my politely desperate gesturing that we follow the others, my partner and I were still centrestage, dancing to that execrable song ‘Sway’, and he, undaunted by the previous futile effort, was still occasionally trying to lift me.
Eventually, as the reviewer reports, all the professional dancers dramatically hit the floor as though shot. But was this lone woman happy to take her well-deserved ovation? I took mine swiftly and fled.
Finding yourself on the stage of the State Theatre is a surreal experience. All you can see is lights. But you can hear, by the laughter, that there are more than a thousand people out there, witnessing your gazelle-in-the-headlights, get-me-out-of-here, I’ll-do-anything-you-want-just-make-this-end-now anti-performance.
You might be wondering whether I can dance. Well, actually I could, once. As a child. The twelve-year-old me even represented Western Australia in national ballroom dancing championships. (I disclose this only to gratify my mother, who is inordinately proud of it.) But I retired soon after. It was long ago. People write historical fiction about that decade.
Now I have middle-aged feet. I have had spinal surgery. I am impossibly uncoordinated. Other than a couple of forays into bellydancing and Bollywood – for fitness, and in the privacy of my own home – I have left dancing to dancers.
So, in effect: no, I can’t dance. Whatever atavistic dance memory remains in my cells, it wasn’t enough.
Here’s a list of things I wish I hadn’t worn on my night out to see Deca Dance:
orthopaedic sandals
leggings, which tend (I now know) to creep uncomfortably south in situations of vigorous movement
a pedometer, attached to said leggings (I was on the 2/5 diet and counting steps – and the fact that the pedometer was shocked into arrest speaks volumes, I feel).
But most of all, I wish I hadn’t worn that purple dress and the beautiful purple scarf Wendy gave me. Why? Well.
When I got home from the theatre that night, I told my husband what had befallen me. (He tried admirably not to snort.) Then I held my breath for an hour or so. If anyone I knew had been in the audience, they would have been on the phone to have their guffaw. Nothing.
But a few weeks later, at the opening party of the Perth Writers Festival, I was introduced to the Director of PIAF, Jonathon Holloway, who frowned a moment before exclaiming, I know! Yes! I saw you at the State Theatre … etc. etc. Hahahaha … etc. etc. And he said he’d seen Deca Dance performed several times in different cities – and they always choose someone colourful as the lone woman. Apparently, there was even a purple spotlight pooling on me in my dying moments.
It would have made a good story, wouldn’t it, if I had suddenly reconnected with my twelve-year-old dancing self on the stage of the State Theatre and (as they say) torn up the floor. If my orthopaedic sandals had miraculously turned into stilettos and my feet been refashioned to suit. If I had metamorphosed into some gorgeous creature able to make the stage her own and to hell with it, to dance like no one was watching, to become, at fifty-six, the centre of attention and loving it! That’s what Jenny Joseph’s wicked narrator would have done. And probably the redhatting women, too.
I failed on all counts. And so I have to wonder: if I am in the process of becoming, then what is it that I am becoming?
Sometimes the only way to answer what is it? is to eliminate all the what-it-is-nots.
I’m not seeking the kind of visibility that makes me the centre of attention – unless I’m meant to be because I’m reading or teaching or speaking publicly as part of my work as a writer. (Really, I would have made a hopeless goth.)
I’m not harbouring an outrageously flamboyant self who longs to break free and fling herself into the purple spotlight; I’ve always been a quiet observer and am happy to remain that way.
I don’t feel bereft at no longer being an object of the male gaze. But nor do I wish to be rendered socially colourless – unseen, obsolete, dismissed.
It’s unlikely I will ever attain the heights of being savagely unimpressed with what the world does to me, although I remain resolutely admiring of those who are.
I don’t yearn to spit or be silly, or to wear a uniform of red and purple. In the words of my friend: it’s just not for me.
But I am way past forty-four now, and in order to own the age I am and accept all those other numbers yet to come, I need to believe that, in growing older, the focus might be on the growing. That change need not be only about degeneration and loss. That I might have more to offer than the statistics to be gained from scans and sample jars bearing my name. What ordinary, human needs they are.
These words from William Yeoman in The West Australian resonate with me:
The sense of possibility in the midst of our always-becoming selves is the ultimate source of all hope, and of all creativity. The first step is recognising our real, imperfect selves and not our imagined selves, whether good or bad, and move from there.19
What is it I am becoming? I think it’s okay not to know. Perhaps the point is that we don’t.
Ironically, the tattoo I chose for my mark of resistance is remarkable among tattoos only for its utter conventionality. But I love the butterfly on my ankle.
Just as ironically, in spite of my wanting goth-black, it turned out a little bit purple.
Notes and References
Introduction
John Edmonds, Tyrian or Imperial Purple Dye: The Mystery of Imperial Purple Dye, Historic Dye Series, John Edmonds, UK, 2000.
Elisabeth West FitzHugh and Lynda A. Zycherman, ‘A Purple Barium Copper Silicate Pigment from Early China,’ Studies in Conservation, 37(3), 1992, pp. 145–154.
John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames & Hudson, UK, 2000.
Simon Garfield, Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2002.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Wordswort
h Editions Ltd, UK, 1996.
William Harper Twelvetrees, ed., Tasmanian Department of Mines, Stichtite: A New Tasmanian Mineral. John Vail Government Printer, Hobart, 1914. http://www.mrt.tas.gov.au/mrtdoc/dominfo/download/GSREC02_OLD/GSREC02.pdf
The Things I Cannot Say
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Abbey Classics, Murrays Children’s Books, UK, 1978.
Louisa May Alcott, Good Wives, Priory Books, Bridlington.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage, London, 2009.
Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Schocken Books, New York, 2009.
Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield 1903–1917, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984.
Maiden Aunts
1 Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, Penguin, London, 2008, pp. 28–29.
Blue Meat and Purple Language
1 ‘Blue Meat and Purple Language’, The Northern Miner, 23 October, 1919, p. 2. http://ttrove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/82750089
2 ‘At the Dance, Deep Purple Language. Trouble at Castlereagh’, The Nepean Times, 10 November, 1928, p. 1. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/100922157
3 ‘Said Language Became Purple When He Quarreled with Wife’, Recorder, 21 January, 1938, p. 1. http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/95939839
4 R. Stephens, J. Atkins and A. Kingston, ‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’, Neuroreport, August 5, 20(12), 2009, pp. 1056–60. http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19590391
5 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act IV, Scene 1.
6 William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene 4.
7 William Shakespeare, Othello, Act I, Scene 1.
8 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Oxford Univerity Press, Oxford, 2008, p. 63.
Into the Whipstick
1 Lisa Baraitser, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. Routledge, London, 2009. See Chapter 4, ‘Maternal Interruptions’. Also see an interesting discussion of Baraitser by Petra Bueskens and Julie Rodgers, and a new essay by Lisa Baraitser in Petra Bueskens, Mothering and Psychoanalysis: Clinical, Sociological and Feminist Perspectives, Demeter Press, Canada, 2009.
2 Susie Orbach and Luise Echenbaum, What Do Women Want?, HarperCollins, London, 1994.
Velvet
1 St Paul’s Cathedral website. http://www.stpauls.co.uk/history-collections/history/jubilee/1935-george-v-silver
2 Drusilla Modjeska, ‘Memoir Australia’, in Timepieces, Picador, Sydney, 2002, p. 196.
3 Richard Holmes, ‘A Meander through Memory and Forgetting’, in Memory: An Anthology, eds Harriet Harvey Wood and A. S. Byatt, Vintage, UK, 2009, p. 95.
4 Lloyd Jones, A History of Silence, Text, Melbourne, Vic., 2013, p. 40.
5 Adam Phillips, ‘The Forgetting Museum’, in Index on Censorship, 34(2), 2005, pp. 34–37.
6 Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic Memory: from Mind to Brain’, in Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 2002, pp. 1–25.
7 Adam Phillips, ‘The Forgetting Museum’.
Do You See What I See?
1 John Gage, Colour in Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 2006, p. 204.
2 ibid., p. 205.
3 Tracy Farr, ‘The Sound of One Man Dying’, in Another 100 NZ Short Short Stories, ed. Graeme Lay, Tandem Press, Auckland, 1998, p. 139.
4 Tracy Farr, ‘The Blind Astronomer’, in The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 1, ed. Fiona Kidman, Vintage, Auckland, 2004, p. 27. First published in Sport 28, March 2002, pp. 135–142 http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz//tm/scholarly/tei-Ba28Spo-t1-body-d18.html
5 ibid., p. 28.
6 Simon Ings, The Eye: A Natural History, Bloomsbury, London, 2007, p. 228.
7 ibid., p. 219.
8 John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p. 136.
9 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995, p. 167.
10 Ings, The Eye, p. 213.
11 Philip Hensher, ‘A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168’, The Paris Review, No. 159, 2001. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/481/the-art-offiction-no-168-a-s-byatt
12 Gage, Colour and Meaning, p. 72.
13 Gage, Colour in Art, p. 147.
14 Gage, Colour and Culture, p. 80.
15 Gage, Colour and Meaning, p. 69.
16 ibid.
17 ibid.
18 Gage, Colour and Culture, p. 140.
19 ibid.
20 Gage, Colour and Meaning, p. 140.
21 Farr, ‘The Blind Astronomer’, p. 27.
22 ibid., p. 30.
23 ibid., pp. 27–30.
24 Patrick Trevor-Roper, The World Through Blunted Sight: Inquiry into the Influence of Defective Vision on Art and Character, revised edition, Souvenir Press, London, 1997.
25 Gage, Colour and Culture, p. 192.
26 Ings, The Eye, p. 193.
27 Margaret Visser, The Way We Are, Penguin, London, 1994, p. 237.
28 Gage, Colour and Meaning, p. 263.
29 ibid., p. 266.
30 Farr, ‘The Sound of One Man Dying’, p. 139.
31 Margaret Visser, The Way We Are, p. 239.
32 Mark Seymour, ‘Do You See What I See’, lyrics, Human Frailty, Mushroom Music, 1987.
33 Paul Kelly, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, Words and Music, Mushroom Music, 1998. In fact, in ‘C90’, the companion piece to ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ in How to Make Gravy (Penguin, Melbourne, 2010, p. 238), Kelly indicates that he is referencing ‘Etta James’s aching “I’d Rather Go Blind” ’.
34 Farr, ‘The Blind Astronomer’, p. 30.
35 Ings, The Eye, p. 13.
36 Farr, ‘The Blind Astronomer’, p. 26.
37 ibid.
38 ibid., p. 30.
39 Eva Isaksson, ‘E-Accessible Astronomy Resources’, ASP Conference Series, No. 432, 2010. http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.1803v1
40 Farr, ‘The Blind Astronomer’, p. 32.
Mary
1 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1931–35, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Hogarth Press, London, 1977, p. 24.
2 Iain Sinclair, Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’, Penguin Books, London, 2006, p. 23.
3 Indebted to Nicolas Abraham’s and Mária Török’s notion of the crypt as developed in their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005.
4 Dorothy Hewett, Greenhouse, Big Smoke Books, Sydney, 1979, p. 40.
5 Dorothy Hewett, ‘The Golden Mean’ in Dorothy Hewett: Collected Poems, ed. William Grono, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA, 1995, p. 408.
The Trouble with Purple
1 Lewis Carroll, Chapter 5, ‘Wool and Water’, Through the Looking Glass. Macmillan, ebook, 2014, np.
2 National Geographic Society, The Genographic Project, 2015. http://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/about/
3 Cassandra Franklin-Barbajosa, ‘In the Wake of the Phoenicians: DNA study reveals a Phoenician-Maltese link’, National Geographic Magazine (online extra), October 2004. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature2/online_extra.html
4 Marcus Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book VII, Ch. XIII, par. 1, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan, Dover Publications, New York, 1960, pp. 119–120.
The Red and the Blue
1 Adam McNicol, ‘Anytime, Anywhere Dockers Claim Famous Finals Win at Geelong’, AFL website. http://www.afl.com.au/news/2013-09-07/dockers-show-their-steel
2 AFL, ‘Respect and Responsibility: What is the Respect and Responsibility Policy?’, AFL Community, 2014. http://aflcommunityclub.com.au/index.php?id=750
3 AFL, ‘Female Football’, AFL Community, 2014. http://aflcommunityclub.com.au/index.php?id=495
4 Anna Krien, Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, Black Inc., Collin
gwood, Vic., 2013, ebook.
5 Fremantle Dockers, ‘Sirens Membership’, Fremantle Dockers website, 2014. http://membership.fremantlefc.com.au/packages-prices/purple-army
6 Krien, Night Games, Loc. 1896.
7 Matt Price, Way to Go: Sadness, Euphoria and the Fremantle Dockers, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA, 2003.
8 Krien, Night Games, Loc. 1918.
9 Rosie Duffy, ‘Margaret’s Century’, Fremantle Dockers News &Media, October 31 2014. http://www.fremantlefc.com.au/news/2014-10-31/margarets-milestone
10 Les Everett, Fremantle Dockers: An Illustrated History, Slattery Media Group, Richmond, Vic., 2014, p. 21.
11 Gervase A. Haimes, Organizational Culture and Identity: A Case Study from the Australian Football League, PhD thesis, Victoria University, 2006, pp. 154–155.
12 Mark Evans quoted in Michael Warner, Herald Sun, ‘AFL Set to Launch Gay Pride Game to Tackle Homophobia During NAB Challenge’, 4 March, 2015. www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/aflset-to-launch-gay-pride-game-to-tackle-homophobia-during-nab-challenge/story-fni5f22o-1227248255109
13 Callum Twomey, ‘Dockers, Swans to Host NAB Challenge Pride Match’, 5 March, 2015, AFL website. http://www.afl.com.au/news/2015-03-05/afl-announces-pride-match
Purple Impressions
1 John Russell letter to Tom Roberts, Winter 1890–91, from Bernard Smith, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period, 1770–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1975, p. 201, quoted in Elena Taylor, Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Vic., 2013, p. 64.
2 ‘Colorants: Pigments versus Dyes’, Lecture 12, PowerPoint presentation, 2001. http://www2.fiu.edu/~gardinal/class_syllabi/IDS4290%20FALL2010/Lecture%2012%20colored%20stuff.pdf
3 Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870–1970 in the Australian National Gallery, ANG, Canberra, 1992, p. 72. http://nga.gov.au/internationalCatalogue/Detail.cfm?ViewID=1&MnuID=1&GalID=ALL&SubVie wID=2&IRN=29073
4 Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color, trans. Ernst van Haagen, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1960, reprinted 1973, p. 72.